Abstract
Objectives
Individual differences in socio-political attitudes can reflect mating interests, and attitudes can also shift in response to mating market cues, including mating competitor quality. In four experiments, we tested whether competitors’ attractiveness (Experiments 1F&1M) and income (Experiments 2F&2M) would influence socio-political attitudes (participants’ self-reported attitudes towards promiscuity and sexual liberalism, traditional gender roles, and the minimum wage and healthcare).
Methods
We collected data from American participants online through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (total N = 787). In all experiments, each participant was randomly assigned to one of four experimental treatments in a between-subjects design (three levels of mating competitor quality and a control group), and to one of five stimuli within each treatment.
Results
Overall, the experimental treatments largely did not predict participants’ socio-political attitudes. The fifteen unique experimental stimuli, however, did significantly affect participants’ perception of their competitors’ quality. That perception, in turn, affected some socio-political attitudes. Namely, individuals who perceived their competitors to be of high mate-value were more supportive of traditional gender roles and, only for men in Experiment 2M, more opposed to promiscuity and sexual liberalism than individuals who perceived competitors to be of low mate-value. These results only applied to sexually unrestricted, but not restricted, women. Perceived mating competition did not affect attitudes towards the minimum wage and healthcare.
Conclusions
Experimental cues of mating competition shifted participants’ perceptions of their competitors’ mating quality and these perceptions in turn shifted some socio-political attitudes. We interpret these results considering broader arguments about plasticity in socio-political attitudes.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank UNSW and the Australian Research Council for supporting this research project. We would also like to thank UNSW Stats Central for the consultation they provided on some of the steps of the data analysis for this project. Finally, we thank Dan Fessler for his useful suggestions at the planning stage of this project, and three anonymous reviewers who provided valuable comments on a previous version of this manuscript.
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Data and code are available at: https://osf.io/fpazx/
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This work was funded by the Australian Research Council (DP160100459) and the University of New South Wales internal funds. The funding sources were not involved in the implementation of the research project.
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This research project was approved by the UNSW Human Research Ethics Committee. Approval Number HC180373. All procedures were performed in accordance with the ethical standards of the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments. All participants provided informed consent before taking part in this research.
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Luberti, F.R., Blake, K.R. & Brooks, R.C. Does the Quality of Mating Competitors Affect Socio-Political Attitudes? An Experimental Test. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology 6, 501–531 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-020-00151-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-020-00151-3